5 Places in Your Office that Are Dirtier than a Toilet

5 Places in Your Office that Are Dirtier than a Toilet

When asked, many people will accuse the restroom of being the dirtiest place in any office or home, but this isn’t always the case. There are sections of your office that experience frequent human contact and can harbor more germs that you can imagine. This is why it’s important to have a commercial cleaning company visit your office on a regular basis to help reduce the amount of germs and potential spread of illness.

Below are five places in your office that are dirtier than a toilet:

Coffee Pot Handles

Most office employees can’t function without their fresh coffee from the breakroom coffee pot. Unfortunately, this is the exact reason why it’s a prime spot for germs to collect and many coffee machines are not properly cleaned. If you work in a fairly large office, you can expect up to 108,592 (Colony-Forming Units) of germs to collect on your office coffee pot handles.

Buttons

There are many buttons in your office. There are buttons on the phone, on the elevator, and on the ATM machines. Buttons are a prime location for germs to collect, because they can be found almost anywhere and play a major role in our lives. Unfortunately, buttons are often overlooked in many cleaning routines and not properly cleaned with disinfectant.

Carpet

According to sources from writer Ed Grabianowski, the average human has roughly 1.6 trillion skin cells and around 30,000 and 40,000 skin cells fall off every hour. Carpet is a common collector of these skins cells when they fall off the human body. Since bacteria love dead skin cells, carpet becomes a home for bacteria to breed.

Desks

According to finding conducted by Dr. Charles Gerba from the University of Arizona, the average office desk can have 10,000,000 bacteria on it, which is roughly 400x more bacteria that is found on the average public restroom toilet.

Water Fountains

Water fountain buttons can be known to have 62,000 to 2.7 million traces of bacteria on it. Some of these bacteria can include E-coli, legionella, and coliform. Findings like this make it reasonable to question if drinking fountains are safe to drink from. Having a commercial cleaning company that regularly disinfects the office water fountain greatly reduces the number of bacteria and its risk of spreading viruses.